Save Article

Disrupt Your Market with Crowdsourcing

Save Article

Salim Ismail, founding executive director and global ambassador at Singularity University, says crowdsourcing will be a critical tool for business innovation and survival.

Crowdsourcing is here to stay. The number of people online is projected to increase from 2.4 billion today to 5 billion by 2020. These minds, armed with ever more affordable tablets and devices, will dramatically increase the general availability of intellectual capital. The technologies and resources now exist for virtually anyone to become skilled in anything very quickly. So the question becomes, “How will you adapt?”

Many executives I talk to are unfamiliar with crowdsourcing, or even dismiss it. If you’re only looking for innovation internally, though, you may find yourself in trouble. There’s too much happening outside your company walls to risk ignoring it, let alone not leveraging it. Consider the newspaper business, which was disrupted by Craigslist, or the music business, which was disrupted by the iTunes® application.¹ Your business counterparts should expect that they will be disrupted even if they don’t yet know in what way. Traditional businesses better figure out how to cannibalize themselves, before someone else does.

Crowdsourcing offers a way for CIOs to address the pressing challenges of ensuring reliability, performance, and security while still helping their companies push the boundaries of innovation. Talent is a massively limiting factor—especially when it comes to taking advantage of disruptive technologies like data science.

There are a few areas where companies can leverage the power of crowdsourcing today. One is microtasking, in which a company creates small pieces of work to outsource. A major retailer hired a crowdsourced team to walk through stores and report on missing products using a mobile app. The experiment enabled the retailer to create a visual heat map showing which products were out of stock throughout a day across its stores in the pilot group. The company then improved internal processes to reduce the number of out-of-stock items.

Additionally, a company can use a crowdsourcing platform for a defined role such as software development. Outsourcing mission-critical processes is the future. This carries enormous risks, yet delivers unprecedented scalability to expand and innovate. I predict that, in the next several years, mission-critical crowdsourcing will become more common, with startups leading the charge and larger organizations following suit to remain competitive. Quirky, a consumer packaged goods (CPG) startup, manages a community of 500,000 inventors to submit ideas. Airbnb leverages the crowd to supply rooms or homes for people to rent while traveling.

When you tap into the crowd, you sacrifice certainty for breadth of creative input. As long as the crowd is large, you have the potential for incredible results at fractional costs. We’re entering a world in which businesses are either the disruptor or the disrupted, and there is no middle ground. Taking advantage of trends like crowdsourcing can help companies remain competitive.

How can any one organization keep up with the ever-increasing pace of technological change? Join forces to create an ecosystem and work together for more efficient innovation. That’s one of many lessons to be learned from the example of Manufacturing USA, which now includes 14 technology-focused institutes.

Between artificial intelligence and new models for human talent, the future of work has arrived, according to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report. It’s a disruptive opportunity, and CIOs can help their organizations make the most of it for benefits including increased productivity and improved customer relationships.

Editors Choice

Many insurers use advanced analytics to gain deeper insights into the underwriting and pricing of risks, but traditional methods are often too slow to meet the volume, speed, and unstructured nature of data captured today. Emerging cognitive and robotic technologies can help insurers keep pace with ever-expanding information flow.

After a relatively subdued 2017, M&A deals are expected to increase in 2018, with acquisition of technology assets the No. 1 strategic driver, according to a Deloitte survey. Technology’s importance in the M&A process appears to continue to rise as it moves deal-making out of the spreadsheet era, dramatically changing M&A in the process.

Some training scenarios for retail employees cannot be easily created on the sales floor, so Walmart sought new ways to replicate those experiences. Virtual reality offered the company an unexpected opportunity to coach workers through situations ranging from responding to a floor spill to managing the holiday rush.

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte Insights for CIOs couples broad business insights with deep technical knowledge to help executives drive business and technology strategy, support business transformation, and enhance growth and productivity. Through fact-based research, technology perspectives and analyses, case studies and more, Deloitte Insights for CIOs informs the essential conversations in global, technology-led organizations. Learn more